ethnomethodology

ethnomethodology

The theoretical and specialist approach within sociology, initiated by Harold GARFINKEL, which sets out to uncover the methods (members’ methods) and social competence that we, as members of social groups, employ in constructing our sense of social reality Ethnomethodologists claim that mainstream sociologists have failed to study, or even to show any awareness of, members’ possession of social competence, treating members merely as ‘cultural dopes’, rather than acknowledging that social reality is created by individuals.

For ethnomethodologists, social reality is always to be seen as the ‘rational accomplishment’ of individuals. Whereas conventional sociologists, e.g. DURKHEIM in Suicide or the symbolic interactionists, are seen as taking actors’ capacity to construct ‘meanings’ merely as an unexamined ‘resource’, ethnomethodology makes the ‘methods’ and TACIT KNOWLEDGE that members possess into a ‘topic’ for analysis. What ethnomethodologists seek to do is to analyse the ACCOUNTS provided by members in particular contexts (hence the extensive use of transcripts of ordinary conversation). In this, there are some similarities and continuities with SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM. Beyond this, however, ethnomethodologists have sought to reveal the more universal recurring members’ methods involved in ‘doing’ social life, e.g. organized ‘turn-taking’ in talk (see also CONVERSATION ANALYSIS, SACKS).

While ethnomethodology claims to have arrived at universal generalizations, the form of these generalizations (e.g. indicating a persistent indexicality (see INDEXICAL EXPRESSION) in members’ accounts) suggests that the type of generalizations traditionally sought by sociology are unlikely to be achieved, or at least the claims for them are premature. By the same token, many of the research methods and assumptions about method and measurement in conventional sociology are criticized by ethnomethodologists as involving MEASUREMENT BY FIAT (see A. Cicourel, 1964).

Distressing as this story is, it offers in an extreme form an example of behaviour which ethnomethodologists would argue is a far better description of human behaviour than ideas of achieved or failed rationality.

Ethnomethodologists have also studied the positive effects of visual cues including eye contact, forward lean when communicating with students, affirmative head nods, and smiles on developing positive academic performance [6, 11].

She had had discussions with ethnomethodologists while a student at Berkeley, but it wasn't until later when she was teaching sociology at the University of British Columbia beginning in the late 1960s that the real upsurge in non-positivist sociology occurred.

To organizational scholars, this observation is the orienting claim of the ethnomethodologists, such as Schutz, Garfinkel, Van Maanen, Barley, Weick, and Roberts, who make the simple observation that explicit communication can never fully describe what we know or the full content of how we are able to "predict" the quotidian rhythms in a given time and place.

T he authors "are left wondering what generates the conventions," but ethnomethodologists are "hermetically sealed off [from political/ideological concerns], because of their phenomenological restriction to, and inclusion in, the lifeworld of the actor level" (p.

xii) note that although ethnomethodology and phenomenology emerged as a reaction to positivism, "many of today's ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists try to bend it to conform to the scientism of the orthodox consensus.

In phenomenological philosophy (Heidegger 1969), reflexivity is the outcome of the separation or breakdown between subject and object and, for ethnomethodologists, from this separation the need arises for 'accountability' - by which is meant making the world comprehensible for oneself and for the other members of a collectivity (Garfinkel 1967).

This is the case, because, as sociological semanticists (Pharo 2004:48-84), neo- Wittgensteinians (Louch 1966:50-60), and ethnomethodologists (Jayyusi 1991:227-51) have underscored over and again, before one can observe and register moral facts, one needs to be able to recognize them, which presupposes at least some kind of a "normative criteriology.

Smith, on the other hand, following the lead of the ethnomethodologists, (35) insisted, from the beginning of her feminist career, on the necessity of knowing the world from within (Smith 1974d:11), and that scholarly analysis had to start from embodied experience.

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